Side Effects

What was Steven Soderbergh thinking? Roman Polanski Repulsion was a classic about madness. Soderbergh’s movie has a similar fascination with objects (in this case a model boat)--and blood. But the subject is feigned madness, something Ophelia was once accused of, that is now presented in what is nothing less than a Elizabethan/Jacobean revenge tragedy about the pharmaceutical business. The plot is a failed cocktail of news headlines that goes as awry as all the failed combinations of SSRI’s that are supposed account for the erratic behavior of its central character Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara). Still the bald-faced contrivance is rather shocking in a filmmaker of Soderbergh’s stature, though some of the blame could fall on the shoulders of the screenplay writer, Scott Z. Burns.You have hedge fund trading and a new anti-depressant called Ablixa, which may have suicidal and homicidal effects on the wrong patient and also a doctor on the payroll of a big drug company. Sound familiar? Lines from William Styron’s memoir of depression, Visible Darkness are quoted in the service of a supposed suspense plot, in which Jonathan Banks, the well-intentioned British psychiatrist (Jude Law) is driven so crazy by the ludicrous criminality he’s caught up in that he picks ups a Thorazine loaded dagger. Soderbergh has announced his retirement from film, having made 26 films by the age of 50. Too bad a pharmaceutically oriented psychiatrist couldn’t have offered him some sort of a drug that makes once talented film directors stop before they go over the edge. 

Contagion

Contagion, the new Steven Soderbergh film, is about an epidemic. Stephen King devoted one of his most famous magnum opuses to a similar subject in The Stand. If you look at medieval woodcuts, you can see the earliest attempts to depict the devastations of the bubonic plague. Novels and films on similar subjects cross a wide variety of genres, from horror films like George Romero’s famed Night of the Living Dead to Nevil Chute’s On the Beach. And depictions of persecution and brain washing run the gamut from the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and of course The Manchurian Candidate, whose cast of right-wing conspirators (including Angela Lansbury) and leftist brain washers palls next to the reality of the tea baggers, luddite unibombers, ideology driven serial murderers and underground wannabees who populate both the imagination and early 21st century reality. Columbine and Oklahoma City have turned out to be as viral as any plague when you look at the Virginia Tech and Fort Hood massacres. Contagion has been praised for its realism, but can any degree of realism do justice to the AIDS epidemic—a nightmare come to life? Geneologies are created in an attempt to divine the source of the infection, epidemiologists search for ARV's (anti retroviral drugs) and retro-thinkers see the virus as a sign of coming Armageddon. May 21 was supposed to be Judgment Day. Meanwhile, Tom Perotta deals with the imaginative consequences of “The Rapture” in his recently published novel The Leftovers.